07-22) 20:44 PDT Berkeley -- An Alameda County judge gave UC Berkeley the go-ahead on Tuesday to clear dozens of trees next to Memorial Stadium and build a proposed athlete training center, a crucial victory for Cal in a protracted battle marked by a widely publicized protest by tree-sitters that began in December 2006.

The long-awaited decision issued late in the day by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara Miller said the university has satisfied environmental and seismic-safety requirements for the project, which has been blocked by a court injunction since February 2007.

Miller said the injunction can be lifted in a week. She postponed removal of the injunction for seven days to give opponents an opportunity to appeal to the state Court of Appeal.

The decision came as a blow to the three plaintiffs that had sought to block the facility - the City of Berkeley, the California Oak Foundation and a neighborhood group, the Panoramic Hill Association. Miller ordered them to pay 85 percent of court costs.

...there's very little they can do about it. Cal is on top of the fault. They can either build new buildings there (with much better seismic characteristics) or they can keep using the old ones, or they can raze the entire campus.

As for the trees, coast live oak is not even remotely an endangered species and Cal has promised to compensate by planting trees elsewhere.

And sections of it move several inches a decade. It has been identified many times as the most dangerous faultline in North America because of its shallow depth and its high activity levels.

Berkeley actually has an information page about the faultline and its impacts and hazards to the campus. If you go here and scroll down a bit, you can actually see photos of the building offsets and distortions that the fault creep has already created on the campus. http://seismo.berkeley.edu/hayward/ucb_campus.html

The Bears are a Pac-10 team that raises the profile of the university and helps to bring in all sorts of endowments. Those endowments help to fund all sorts of other programs and campus development that assists all students. Yes, they spend a lot of money on spoiled athletes, but in doing so they bring even more money into the university. It's a win for all of the students, whether they're athletes or not.

Here's the rub. Good athletes have to be recruited, and they are usually juggling multiple offers when they select a school to attend. The quality of the facilities is a big part of a student athletes decision on which school they're going with. Other major universities are upgrading or replacing their facilities, so Berkeley has to either update their own or start losing top tier athletes and accept a second-rate team. Doing that will cause the money to dry up.

Student for student, Berkeley gets no more money than any other campus is the UC system, and they don't get nearly enough money from the state to fund all of their programs. If they didn't have resources like the Cal Bears to pull in alternative revenue streams, they'd have to cut programs and reduce course availability, which would hurt everyone. Lots of Berkeley students don't actually like football, but it's understood that the prestige (and in turn, money) they bring into the school are essential if it's to continue being a top tier institution.

and unfortunately you're right on all counts. It's a sucky system, but there it is. Cal's still got one of the most beautiful (and forested) campuses in the country. I haven't seen it in person in almost 20 years and I miss it.

My dad was '50-something, not sure, actually. I'm impressed, though, your dad was there during a most turbulent period. When I was there (77-83, got my masters there too) we had a lot of anti-draft/anti-Reagan demonstrations, plus the South Africa divestiture movement was going on then too. Man I miss the place. 2000 miles away now though.

He told me once that he'd have dropped out like most of his friends, but my grandfather swore that he'd hunt him down and beat him to a bloody pulp if he didn't graduate. My grandfather had mortgaged his home to send my dad to Berkeley, and he didn't make idle threats

So he protested and smoked pot by day, and crammed for classes at night. He graduated, but only barely.

I expected a lot when I got there, but by the early 90's the campus was quiet. Still, being a CompSci major at Berkeley just as the Internet was going public and PC's were starting to penetrate the home was exciting from a geeky standpoint! There was no time for protesting...we were busy trying to change the world!

22. Punch cards? LOL! We'd traded those for floppy disks by the time I was there.

BTW, Bush Sr. was actually president for most of my time at Berkeley. There were some minor political protests during the first Gulf War, but nothing on the scale of the 60's. There were also some NAFTA protests, but again I don't think any of them really attracted more than a few hundred people (I was involved with some of those, and we were always disappointed with the turnout).

12. Terran -- I'm an alum too. I went back recently...You won't recognize a lot of it.

It's like they are trying to cram as many buildings as possible onto a relatively small area of acreage. I understand the dorm building -- remember the housing shortages there? But, jeez, the campus is overflowing with buildings that don't necessarily have anything to do with each other, architecturally.

18. Yeah, I know they built a big life sciences building, or something?

That's somewhere near the Eucalyptus Grove (which I hope is still there??)? There's nowhere to expand, really, as I'm sure the city doesn't want the university enchroaching any more than it alrerady has, so they have to cram more buildings in. Ah progress.

Best campus memory: tripping on shrooms one December night with friends, at the base of the Campanile looking up, and seeing it as a platform extending out into space. That and just hanging out on Sproul Plaza.

26. Man, there was nothing like those Sproul Plaza afternoons, was there?

The sun, the crowds passing under Sather Gate, the leafletters, the smell of falafels , the chimes of the Campanile ... And, when I was there, Scott the Piano Man would wheel out his piano and play tunes during lunch time almost every day. Other campus characters were Rick Starr the very bad singer, the Bubble Lady, the wear a red-ribbon-against-apartheid guy, the transvestite guy, and the woman who walked her goat and her pig on campus ... Ahhh, those were the days.

Speaking as a UCLA alum, with a daughter at Cal, who has taught at USC . . . I do understand how these things work.

Still, it seems like a never ending spiral. And it's one reason most schools lose money on athletics. It is a bit galling to see major academic institutions competing so desperately for the favors of a few 18-year olds who don't really care much about academics anyway.

Yeah, lots of students went to the games when I was attending. I didn't, and there was no shortage of other students who didn't either. In the early 90's I'd say that maybe HALF of the students were really into the games or followed them with any regularity. The rest ignored it (except for the Stanford games...everyone went to those).

The male bastion on the hill. A friend from high school got placed there our first year, and he was a proto-hippy, real bad result for him, but I think he found the 'guys' amusing. Another friend got into Stern Hall down the road, the all-female dorm, and it was equally bad in its own way!

I lived in Ida Sproul for a couple of years, mainly because of the great Bay views. I was a Cal fan too, never missed a game until grad school. Hoo boy, good times! "SC SUCKS! SC SUCKS" Heehee!

I was just there a couple of years ago and was shocked at the changes to Bowles. Apparently it's only open to freshman for their first year now, they've shut down the dining halls (which sucks, since the Friday BBQ's were the best part of being there), and the whole building seems to be slowly disintegrating. Lots of the old Bowles traditions aren't practiced anymore. I was told that they cracked down on it a couple of years ago because it just started getting out of control.

I loved those trees but unfortunately, Cal needs the damn facility, for reasons well stated above. They know the Haward fault will blow one day, so these facilties will be some the most seismically engineered structures in the world. I bet they thought about just packing up and moving, leaving nothing but practice fields for general university use. But where? Oakland? Fremont? The East Bay is one of the most population dense regions in CA. There was no other place else to move in an economically viable manner. Anyway, Go Bears!

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